Ann and Jim Goodnight Museum Park

Explore

The Ann and Jim Goodnight Museum Park connects art, nature, and people to encourage creative experiences and human interactions. It features temporary and permanent public art installations by international artists, environmentally sustainable landscapes, colorful and contemporary gardens, miles of recreational trails, and a terraced pond.
Choose your own adventure in the Park: Step inside a cloud chamber. Picnic near the iconic trio of Gyre rings, or relax on the Ellipse lawn. Bike and jog along the Capital Area Greenway and wooded trails. Discover points of interest on trailside signs with information on art and the history of the NCMA, and participate in recreational programs and performing arts. Visit the Park often to find your own special connection, and sign up for email updates to learn more about Park events and news.

Art in the Park

The Museum Park art program facilitates collaborations among artists, designers, and environmental scientists to create works of art inspired by the natural world. Artists are commissioned to create site-specific temporary and permanent works that directly engage the landscape and present new perspectives on the natural world, exploring our relationship to the environment and the role of nature in contemporary society.

You & Me is an interactive work that requires two people's participation. There are seven pairs of platforms throughout the Park. Use the You & Me map, which you can pick up at the West Building Information Desk, to find a pair of platforms and have your partner stand on one platform while you stand on the other. When in position, each of you will appear to the other to be on or in a nearby work of art.

Take photos of what you see and share them on social media using #NCMAyoume.

The Three Shades in the Rodin Garden

The Rodin Garden, outside West Building, is one of the most stunning places on the Museum campus. Delicate bamboo shoots tower overhead, and a reflecting pool with gorgeous water lilies sets off the remarkable life-size Rodin bronzes.

Rodin’s The Three Shades was originally conceived for The Gates of Hell. In the Inferno Dante describes three shades, souls of his departed countrymen, who danced in a circle as they told of their woeful state in Hades. In the plan of The Gates of Hell, the shades pointed downward to an inscription: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

The honeycombed layers of Ursula von Rydingsvard’s sculptures consist of roughly hewn cedar blocks cut and stacked to create vessel-shaped forms that also make reference to the rocky cliffs of a natural landscape, the human body, and architectural structures. She creates her sculptures intuitively, layer by layer, without preliminary sketches or models, and the irregular markings that cover the surface remind the viewer that this is a labor-intensive process. The artist says:

My love for wood is part of my history. I come from a long line of Polish peasant farmers, and they were surrounded with wood—wooden homes, wooden fences, domestic implements, wooden tools to farm the land. When you enter any of those houses you’ll see right outside a huge stack of firewood, usually quite beautifully stacked, with smoothly cut ends. There is, I guess, a feeling of familiarity, a feeling of comfort and grace. And at the same time, because of the familiarity, I can really push it around.

Askew is part of a series of works that Roxy Paine describes as “dendroids,” treelike forms with elaborate branching structures. His sculptures are inspired by real trees but never truthful depictions of actual species. “I’ve processed the idea of a tree and created a system for its form," Paine says. "I take this organic, majestic being and break it down into components and rules. The branches are translated into pipe and rod.”

The stainless steel surfaces of the work change dramatically with the light—mirroring, absorbing, and reflecting the tree’s environment, and turning the colors of the natural world into a brilliant metallic light show.

Roxy Paine, Askew, 2009, stainless steel, H. 46 ft. 8 in., Gift in honor of Julia Jones Daniels, chairman of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Museum of Art (1998–2002) and member of the Board of Trustees (1983–95)

Henry Spencer Moore, Large Standing Figure: Knife Edge

This prolific sculptor made work in wood, stone, and bronze. As a student in London, Henry Moore absorbed the influences around him, both the work of his contemporaries and the pre-Columbian and ancient art in the British Museum. It is easy to see a connection between Large Standing Figure and ancient art. Moore called an earlier version of this work Winged Victory, acknowledging the Louvre’s Hellenistic Nike of Samothrace.

Moore liked the shape of bones. He studied and drew them and had the idea to model a work on the knife-edge thinness of a bird’s breast bone. He worked up the maquette in clay, adding vestigial head and arms and elaborating the torso with drapery—thus drawing out an affinity with Greek sculpture. The sculpture retains a suggestion of a wingspread and, with the wings’ diagonal orientation, a sensation of rising skyward.

Henry Moore admired the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși for returning sculpture to uncomplicated, basic shapes, a lesson he took to heart. A striking formal simplification is a hallmark of Moore’s oeuvre.

The soft curves and bulges of Large Spindle Piece reflect the artist’s abiding interest in organic form, yet its pointed projections—echoing machine parts—demonstrate that he was not unaffected by modern technology. Moore’s concern was not just with nature and the human figure, but with their relationship to the man-made environment.

Sited to honor Moore’s intention that the work be viewed from different angles, Large Spindle Piece is perhaps best seen against the backdrop the artist preferred above all others, the sky.

While you’re exploring the Museum Park, look for 14 metal plates with etchings of native plants and animals. They were designed by artist Tim Purus as reliefs that show the connection between art and the natural world. Bring paper and crayons with you, and you can make your own work of art, a plate rubbing, to take home.

The largest work of art at the NCMA was a collaboration between textual artist Barbara Kruger, architects Henry Smith-Miller and Laurie Hawkinson, and landscape architect Nicholas Quennell. Giant letters that stretch across the amphitheater and outdoor stage spell out PICTURE THIS. The 80-foot-long letters are sculpted into the landscape from a variety of materials and sprawl over more than two acres.

A World War II veteran, Vollis Simpson built his first wind machine as a power source while stationed on the island of Saipan. He started creating kinetic sculptures out of found objects when he retired in 1985 in eastern North Carolina. Made of discarded parts from cars, trucks, bicycles, farm machinery, streetlights, and highways signs, Simpson’s whirligigs transform everyday objects and industrial materials into whimsical sculptures.

South African artist Ledelle Moe works in steel and concrete to create larger-than-life figurative sculptures. Collapse I sprawls across the top of a ridge in the Museum Park, a massive human form lying on its side. Her Untitled sits along the trail deeper in the woods, a boulderlike form of a human figure curled into a ball. Inside West Building is another of her works, Congregation, in which she incorporated soil from the Park.

This shelter operates as an oversized camera obscura or pinhole camera. A small aperture in the roof projects an inverted image of the sky onto the floor of the chamber, an effect that seems to pull the sky down to the viewer. Inside, one’s perspective is turned upside down. Instead of looking up at the sky, trees, or clouds, one looks down on them from above.

Chris Drury, Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky, 2003, stone, wood, and turf, approx. Diam. 12 ft., Commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Art with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society

Thomas Sayre, Gyre

This sculpture was created on site by North Carolina artist Thomas Sayre. A backhoe was used to dig three elliptical trenches that were filled with concrete and steel bars. After the concrete curves cured for a month, a crane lifted the rings from the ground and lowered them into their existing location. The title Gyre refers to a circular or spiraling motion—gyration—and a spiraling shape, like a vortex or tornado.

Thomas Sayre, Gyre, 1999, three ellipses of concrete, colored with iron oxide, reinforced with steel, and mottled with dirt residue from earth casting,overall length 150 ft. Gift of Artsplosure, City of Raleigh, and various donors

Mike Cindric and Vincent Petrarca, Lowe’s Pavilion

Designed and built specifically for this site by an artist and a designer who both live and work in Raleigh, this “art-as-shelter” project blends easily into its natural surroundings. The perforated, metallic skin of the pavilion, inspired by the transparent quality of a dragonfly’s wings, changes with the time of day and the quality of light—reflecting its natural surroundings and taking on the colors of the trees, grass, and sky—or nearly disappearing into a shimmering pattern of light and shadow.

Placed at the threshold between the field and forest, Crossroads/Trickster I marks a transitional point from public to private, manmade to natural, open to enclosed. The sculpture combines brightly colored Italian glass tiles, carnelian stones, and shattered bricks (recycled from the Polk youth correctional facility, located on this property from 1920 to 1997). The artist has described her use of the prison bricks as “time capsules,” a way of creating a new work of art that speaks to the historical significance of this place. The sculpture is also closely connected to the surrounding landscape. Rooted in the ground, its shape and scale echo the tree trunks in the forest behind it, and its earth-toned palette of red, brown, and orange ties it to the natural world.

Al Frega, an artist who lives in Durham, recycled and repurposed metal bars and other materials from a youth correctional facility that once stood on this land.

Al Frega, Benches and bicycle racks, 2005, wrought iron, steel, various dimensions, Commissioned with funds from the North Carolina Department of Transportation Enhancement Program and the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources Adopt-a-Trail Grant Program

Park Pictures, ongoing, various artists

Park Pictures, large-scale outdoor pictures in three locations along the greenway, are changed regularly to feature different artists.

The presentation of Park Pictures at the NCMA is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park, and made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina.

Steed Taylor, Invasive

Steed Taylor’s temporary “road tattoos” will eventually disappear as the paint is worn away by weather and traffic. The design for Invasive is based on 18th-century European floral fabric patterns and contemporary tattoo designs. Before the final pattern was painted, names of invasive plants were written within the outlines of the design and then painted over, a symbolic act of containment.

Steed Taylor, Invasive, 2008, high-gloss latex paint, various dimensions, Museum commission funded by the John Rex Endowment through the Physical Activity and Nutrition Branch of the N.C. Division of Public Health

Bill and Mary Buchen, Flight Wind Reeds

Bill and Mary Buchen, Flight Wind Reeds, 2003, aluminum, stainless steel, and brass, five elements, each approx. H. 25 ft., Commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Art with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest)

The sculpture is made from metal crowd-control barricades and is designed to resemble a brain if viewed from above. By elevating the barricades, the artist subverts their original use and intention: visitors are not kept out, but rather invited in to freely wander through the work.

Shaped like cartoon speech bubbles, these sculptures offer visitors a place to sit and interact with the works of art and with each other. The artist states, “When viewers occupy the piece, they are encouraged to contemplate what it means to inhabit their own speech and beliefs.”

SCULPT. C is one in a series of large-scale whimsical sculptures titled Tiovivo (which translates as carousel or merry-go-round) by Spanish artist, Jaime Hayon. Covered with a colorful pattern and scaled for children, his engaging sculpture encourages play and interaction.

Yinka Shonibare MBE, Wind Sculpture II

Known for his figurative sculptures that use Dutch wax cloth (popular throughout Africa) to explore cultural identity, Yinka Shonibare here transforms a wisp of the same fabric into a playfully monumental sculpture that captures the wind like a giant sail. Wind Sculpture II is one of Shonibare’s first large-scale outdoor works and was featured in his career retrospective exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England.

Jaume Plensa, Awilda & Irma

Awilda & Irma are portraits of a mother and daughter. The enormous scale of the heads blurs and softens individual features, making it difficult to discern race or age or gender, resulting in more universal portraits. Plensa wants his sculptures to speak to a collective human identity, to an essential human existence, and to what we hold in common as human beings.

Joan Miró, Lunar Bird

Lunar Bird by Joan Miró resembles ancient votive sculptures and reflects his interest in the cosmos, with its crescent moon–shaped face and arms reaching toward the sky. A figure in the early-20th-century surrealist art movement, Miró saw art as a way for the subconscious mind to express itself.

George Rickey, Three Red Lines

George Rickey’s Three Red Lines is a kinetic sculpture composed of three pointed arms that gracefully move in an arc. He utilized ball bearings, pendulums, counter-weights, and pivot points to predetermine the path that the arms of the sculpture take.

Ellsworth Kelly, Untitled

The abstract sculpture Untitled, part of Ellsworth Kelly’s “rocker” series, was conceived when the artist took a plastic coffee lid from his local deli, cut out a flat section, folded it in half, and rocked it back and forth on a table. The sculpture plays with depth and dimension, as the rounded edge of the ellipse contrasts with the extreme flatness of the sculpture’s surface.

Roxy Paine, Askew

Henry Spencer Moore, Large Standing Figure: Knife Edge

Martha Jackson-Jarvis, Crossroads/Trickster I

Park Info

The Park is free and open daily, including holidays, from dawn to dusk.

The Park’s trail system leads visitors through natural areas and to commissioned works of art. Designed for hiking, walking, and jogging only, the unpaved natural trails allow visitors to deeply experience art and nature. Cyclists and self-propelled wheeled vehicles may travel on the paved trails only.

The Reedy Creek Greenway system is a paved multiuse pathway that runs through west Raleigh and connects the eastern portion of the Park to Meredith College and N.C. State University via a pedestrian bridge. The greenway connects the western portion of the NCMA Park to Umstead State Park and Schenck Forest.

Park rules are enforced to protect visitor safety, works of art, and the environment.

Public Safety

It is unlawful to possess firearms or other weapons on Museum grounds.

Fireworks, cap pistols, air guns, bows and arrows, slingshots, and lethal projectiles of any kind are strictly prohibited.

Possession or consumption of alcoholic beverages is prohibited except during Museum-organized events.

Drones or other mechanical flying devices are prohibited.

Unauthorized motor vehicles are prohibited on Park trails.

Overnight camping, charcoal grills, and fires are prohibited.

Bikes and Pets

Cyclists must yield to pedestrians and obey posted regulations.

Pets must be on leash and under constant control.

Owners are required to clean up after their pets. Use the trash receptacles.

Owners may be asked to remove aggressive or noisy pets.

Art and the Environment

Do not climb on or touch works of art in the Park, unless otherwise indicated.

Removal or injury of any plant in the Park is prohibited.

Carry all trash to a receptacle or out of the Park. Littering is illegal; pack in, pack out.

Do not disturb natural areas. Do not remove or any plant from the Park.

Metal detectors are not permitted.

Commercial business activity, including photography and video recording, is permitted only with prior authorization.

Visitors are encouraged to volunteer in the NCMA Park on designated work days. Projects include mulching trails, removing exotic species, planting seedlings, removing trash, and maintaining art installations, which could include painting, cleaning, or installing art pieces.

Park Map

Park Projects

The Museum Park has been transformed over the 30 years since the Museum opened on Blue Ridge Road, growing from the original 50-acre site in 1983 to the current 164-acre campus of trails amid outdoor sculpture. The Park provides a unique opportunity for experiencing art and active living.

Complete

Park Expansion

From August 2015 through September 2016, we created new tree-lined parking, contemporary gardens, a promenade connecting Park and galleries, and an elliptical lawn overlooking the Park’s beautiful rolling meadow. Learn more.

Summer 2016

Park Volunteer Toolshed

The Museum partnered with North Carolina State University’s School of Architecture on a toolshed for volunteers. (The Museum also partnered with the school in 2012 for a pond platform project.) Graduate students in a summer 2016 Design/Build program led by Durham architects Randall Lanou and Ellen Cassilly designed and built the toolshed in the Museum’s new Discovery Garden. The structure supports volunteers’ weekly work in the NCMA Park and provides a covered space for future programs in the garden.

Ongoing

Invasive Species Control

NCMA Park staff members have expertise in horticulture and ecology. They consult with specialists at N.C. State University to determine how best to handle the kudzu and blackberries on the Museum campus. These invasive species threaten other wildlife such as native trees. Volunteers and staff cut back the vines and bushes and carefully apply chemicals to slow their progress. But these invasive species will never fully disappear, making constant maintenance necessary.

April 2013

Blue Loop Trail

Through a generous gift from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, the Museum has undertaken a major expansion and revision of Park trails. The centerpiece of the project is a one-mile trail (the Blue Loop) for walking and cycling that opens a new section of the Park.

August 2012

Pond Platform (“The Turning Point”)

The Museum partnered with N.C. State University’s School of Architecture for this project. Graduate students in a summer Design/Build program led by architects Ellen Cassilly and Randy Lanou designed and built a viewing platform off the wooded path. From its deck visitors have a view across the water back to the Museum, reinforcing connections between Park and galleries while providing a respite and gathering place.

October 2010

Museum Pond and Sustainable Irrigation System

With generous support from the Clean Water Management Trust Fund, the Museum’s retention pond was redesigned to aesthetically control and clean storm water before it enters North Carolina’s streams and rivers. Terraces are planted with native perennials and ornamental grasses. As water moves across these various ecosystems, pollutants are filtered from the water via plant roots and soil particles. The pond renovation is part of a comprehensive storm water management initiative for the Museum campus, which also includes a 90,000-gallon underground water storage cistern, rain gardens, and drought-tolerant plantings and fescue lawn.

April 2010

West Building Landscape

The lush sculpture gardens, designed by Lappas + Havener, unite stunning landscape design and sustainable environmental standards. Gravel and paved paths lead to striking works of art, some especially commissioned for the new landscape. Three reflecting ponds filled with water lilies and lotus plants accent the outdoor gathering spaces. The sustainable water management system ties into the Museum Pond.

November 2004

Pedestrian Bridge

A connector between two pieces of the Reedy Creek Greenway system, the 660-foot-long, 12-foot-wide, triple-arch bridge provides safe passage for pedestrians and cyclists over the busy I–440 Beltline.

Park Supporters

The North Carolina Museum of Art is grateful to the following donors who have made major contributions to the Ann and Jim Goodnight Museum Park and the Art in the Environment Fund:

The 1947 Society (Gifts of $1,000,000 and more)

Joseph M. Bryan, Jr.

Ann and Jim Goodnight

The North Carolina Clean Water Management Trust Fund

$500,000 –$999,999

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina

Estate of Ruby Crumpler McSwain

North Carolina State Art Society

$250,000–$499,999

Ernest and Ruby McSwain Charitable Foundation

Tom and Pat Gipson
GSK

Harriet Jackson Phelps Charitable Trust

Hunter Industries, Inc.

John Deere Foundation
Thomas S. Kenan III

National Endowment for the Arts

$100,000–$249,999

Estate of Mrs. Warner L. Atkins

Libby and Lee Buck

Duke Energy

The Hartfield Foundation
David R. Hayworth

N.C. Department of Environmental Quality

Wells Fargo Philanthropic Services

$50,000–$99,999

A. J. Fletcher Foundation
BB&T

Julia and Frank A. Daniels, Jr.

Dover Foundation, Inc.

Mrs. James Ficklen, Jr.

Mr. and Mrs. Jake Froelich, Jr.

Mr. and Mrs. Alfred L. Hobgood, Jr.

Institute of Museum and Library Services

Lowe’s Companies, Inc.

Martin Marietta Materials, Inc.*

Frances M. and William R. Roberson, Jr.

Joel and Christy Shaffer

Mr. and Mrs. J. Willie York

$25,000–$49,999

Holly and Bill Blanton

Mr. and Mrs. Albert G. Borden

Mrs. Starke S. Dillard, Jr.

Mr. and Mrs. Harvey B. Hamrick

Carol and Rick McNeel

Mills Family Foundation
Rauch Industries, Inc.

SunTrust Bank

U.S. Department of Education

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